Risk of hypertension in school-aged children undergoing a long-term community-based lifestyle intervention: Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study

Abstract

Childhood hypertension which increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases in adulthood is becoming more prevalent. For the first time in the Middle-East region, this study aimed to assess the long-term effectiveness of a community-based lifestyle intervention on the incidence of hypertension in school-aged children during 16 years of follow-up. This study was conducted within the framework of the Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study (TLGS). Participants were 2080 children aged 8–18 years with normal blood pressure who were under the coverage of three health care centers selected using multistage cluster random sampling method. One of the health care centers far from the other two was selected for implementing lifestyle intervention (1053 children, 48.2% boys). Triennial examinations were conducted, and survival Cox models were used to assess intervention effects on the incidence of hypertension in boys and girls. Crude incidence rates (per 1000 person-years) of hypertension were 8.11, 3.7, and 5.8 among boys, girls, and the total sample, respectively. Our results showed that HTN has occurred significantly less (P = 0.025) in the intervention group than in the control group, only in female participants. These results remained significant even after adjusting for individuals' and parental characteristics (P = 0.033). Although the risk of hypertension in boys was more than twice that observed in girls, the effectiveness of the recent community-based healthy lifestyle intervention was observed only in girls and not in boys. Further studies are needed to understand gender differences in promoting the effectiveness of similar future programs.The TLGS is registered at Iran Registry for Clinical Trials, a WHO primary registry (http://irct.ir; IRCTID: IRCT138705301058N1).